Nana from Crossfya shares his story
Image Credit: Crossfya
29th Jul 2020
Tags:
Music
Interview
Crossfya
Rap
UK-based band Crossfya recently released a new song called "Amen", a personal song about their lead vocalist Nana's earlier life.
Our team member Juliette had the opportunity to interview Nana on his journey to joining Crossfya and the reason why he decided to open up on this track.
Juliette: How did you first get into music?
Nana: I went to a youth club and they had a recording studio. The guy in there was teaching us how to make beats and how to make music as one of the activities. I made this beat, which I really enjoyed, so I came back a few times.
When the beat was ready, we realised we needed someone to perform on it and I didn’t really have anyone to perform on it. I was like fifteen and nobody that I knew did music so I did it myself.
I kept working on my voice.
It was just a really fun thing for us to do. I got really good feedback from adults and people around me, so after that, I kept doing music and I kept working on my voice.
Juliette: What’s your relationship like with the rest of the band Crossfya? How did you get to know each other?
Nana: I did some stuff years ago with The Message Trust and with LZ7. From that, I kept in contact with another band that they had called Social Beingz. At that time they were called Twelve24 and they asked me to come and do some cover gigs with them.
I also jumped on one of their tracks on their album. One of the guys from that band was friends with another guy who was in Crossfya at the time.
Crossfya had just lost their female vocalist and they were looking for another vocalist. So obviously people had a conversation and they were told about me.
Met the Crossfya guys and I did one tour with them.
I went to meet the Crossfya guys and I did one tour with them. I did the Schools Tour. And at the end of the week they said “Would you like to join the group?”, and I said “Yeah.”
Juliette: ‘Amen’ is not as upbeat as Crossfya’s other songs. Why did you feel it was important to share your story now?
Nana: We have a drummer called Rodney – a really nice guy – and he said to me, “I’d love to hear something more personal, something a lot deeper.”
I started writing ‘Amen’ because I felt like that was what was needed in order for us to show people that we’ve been through things.
For each one of us, God has helped us get through those things and that’s why we are where we are today. And even then, we still have our struggles.
I talk about the racism I dealt with in school.
Obviously, in the song I’m talking about my different struggles but I also talk about the racism I dealt with in school, which kind of impacted me at that time. It was a hard time because I was already struggling with a relationship breakdown between me and my parents.
Then later, in the years after that, something happened and my cousin got into an altercation with the police. They were stamping on his head and then a couple of weeks later, he got a brain tumour, which got worse and worse, and then he died.
He was my like favourite cousin. Every time we went to see him, he and his brothers just really built us up. They really encouraged us.
Now was the best time to release the track.
I recorded the song before lockdown, so obviously I didn’t know lockdown was even going to happen. Everything just synced with the Black Lives Matter protests and we thought that now was the best time to release the track.